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Language is complicated, and in the context of shifting cultural norms, it gets even more complicated. So the question comes up: Is it OK to swear in our content marketing?
We had a bit of a dust-up on Copyblogger a few years back, and every once in awhile the topic comes back up again.
The question: Who decides what kind of language is appropriate for a blog, podcast, or other content marketing? Where is the line, and who gets to draw it?
In this 25-minute episode, I talk about:
Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.
I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.
Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!
So one of those questions that comes up a lot, along with “how long should blog posts be” and “how often should I publish,” is:
Is it OK if I swear on my blog?
I don’t swear on this podcast, because I have been informed that iTunes doesn’t like it when we swear on our podcasts, and I want this to reach a wide audience.
Once again one of those rules of thumb of digital sharecropping — if I’m going to take advantage of iTunes to reach a wider audience, then I have to follow their rules.
Every once in awhile this comes up on Copyblogger, harkening back to well-known copywriter and teacher of copywriting, Bob Bly, who was very unhappy with us for running a post by Joanna Wiebe, in which she used the term “mofo” in her bio.
The post was superb, by the way, from Joanna Wiebe: 6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons. Lots of deep analysis and specific examples, which she’s so good at.
The quote isn’t in the post any more, because author bios get updated as the writer’s professional situation evolves, but at the time it was this:
Where startups & marketers learn to convert like mofos.
This wasn’t something we in Copyblogger editorial found particularly controversial, then or now, just to give some context.
So Bob is very smart, and he has a lot of experience, and he felt very strongly that this cheapened the content. One of the comments he left was,
If it might offend even one in a hundred, why risk it, when you can say the same idea without the profanity?
In his (strong) opinion, there are standards of public discourse, and not swearing is one of those standards.
He wrote an entire post about it, quoted here:
I contend that in articles published online and offline on business topics, it is completely unnecessary, and people do it primarily to look cool and hip to their counterparts.
But by doing so, they turn off a large segment of their readership, me included … mostly the 50 and over crowd.
If you are a marketer, I would warn you not to alienate oldsters, as we control most of the money in the United States.
A survey reported on the Joshua Kennon web site found that households where the head was age 35 and younger had a median net worth of only $65,000.
By comparison, households where the head was 55 to 64 years old had a median net worth of $880,000 – nearly 14X richer.
-Bob Bly
So Bob’s case is (partly) economic — is it bad business to swear in our content?
In terms of this question about turning your audience away, I’m reworking my Remarkable Communication site to run on Rainmaker finally after putting it off, and I feel like a complete moron about it. The only part of the process that was tricky was finding all of my old login information. The migration took something like seriously maybe 20 minutes. So I’m sprucing up the sidebars and and reworking things like the About page, but I am so excited to be able to share it with you soon. I’m really happy, it looks so amazing. My goal is to use Rainmaker strictly out of the box without getting help to set it up.
Anyway.
I ran across a post I wrote about a soap company called Nancy Boy.
Now, Nancy boy breaks all of the email marketing rules for content.
I gave an example of their email messaging (link in the show notes), and I had this to say about it:
You may be thinking, wow, that’s wordy. And kind of insane. And it uses the word prevarication, they’re gonna get some unsubscribes with that one.
It’s a little like horehound candy, or stinky goat cheese. A lot of people don’t like it. Maybe most people don’t like it.
But the people who do absolutely crave it.
In 2009 I wrote about their content being “an attitude that is euphemistically called Very San Francisco.
In 2016 we speak a little more plainly — The content for Nancy Boy is … gay. It’s not just slightly gay. It’s very, very gay. Their tagline is “tested on boyfriends, not animals.” Um, the name of their business is Nancy Boy. There is no closet available here to hide in.
Now, being gay — especially in a way that’s this out — is for many folks in our culture in the U.S. a lot more controversial than swearing. “MoFo” doesn’t have much on gay.
They’re absolutely alienating many people. Many, many people. Look on Twitter or Facebook if you think everyone is super comfortable with gay people today.
And yet, to restate the point I made in 2009, they’re selling soap in one of the highest real-estate cities in the country. Soap. They still have their retail store, in the really extremely expensive and adorable Hayes Valley neighborhood.
And they have a thriving mail order business still, and they still send crazy emails. Their latest one in my in-box has a picture of a dog licking plates in the dishwasher, to highlight that they sell a nice-smelling dish detergent.
Their tribe is strong enough to support them, and their tribe loves them because they’re not for everyone. Because they’re brave enough to be a tall, proud, out Nancy Boy. I can get great-smelling soap at Whole Foods, but I still mail-order soap and some other nice-smelling things from Nancy Boy because I love them, because I feel connected to them.
Joanna also wrote about this on her blog, Copyhackers, which is a good read and I’ll give you a link in the show notes.
Swearing, Euphemisms and Writing Something That Actually Sounds Like You
Here’s a quote:
I always recommend that you write for the 20 to 35% of your visitors that are most likely to a) convert and b) be happier for it. I recommend that because I’ve tested it and it works. It’s not just an assumption I randomly pulled out of the air and tried once; it’s not like I applied a go-narrow principle to my business and my business alone and found that it prettymuch worked, so now I think everyone should do the same for similar results.
So this points to the same thing I see at Nancy Boy. They’re writing for their customers, not the entire universe of possible customers. In Nancy Boy’s case, their customers start in their local neighborhood, and now many years on, are made up of like-minded people from all over the place.
Another quote from Joanna:
But, without question, you are taking a risk when you use that kind of language…. With regard to risk, you’re also taking a risk when you absolutely avoid euphemisms and impolite words in your copy.
The message isn’t, “Yes, go swear on your blog.”
The message isn’t, to be crystal clear, that I think Bob was wrong on this. In fact, I really did not appreciate folks being disrespectful in the comments to him about it. They were trying to stand up for us and for Joanna, but that wasn’t necessary in this case.
The message is,
You don’t get to decide what’s relevant or appropriate. Your audience does.
The Copyblogger readership is, for the most part, 1000% comfortable with the term “MoFo.”
Is Bob wrong because he’s not comfortable with it? Not at all. We respect Bob a ton. His point of view is very valid.
We actually swear very, very little on Copyblogger, precisely because we have a large audience that’s extremely diverse. We know that there are some folks who really don’t appreciate it — that’s part of who our audience is.
But once in awhile, certain words feel like they’re important to state a point clearly. I’m not a big fan of euphemism, as anyone who’s ever heard me give a talk can attest to. So I don’t like “friggen” or “flippin.” Actually for me, my issue with MoFo is precisely that it’s a euphemism. I was taught early on as a writer to avoid them, and I try to.
So here’s my advice:
Overall I recommend that you not swear for the sake of swearing. It’s kind of lazy and not necessarily very interesting. That kind of language has a lot of power, but the power comes from holding it back to make an impact when you really want to make a point very strongly.
If your audience swears a lot and that’s what feels right for connecting to them, then make your decisions accordingly.
If your audience doesn’t appreciate it, then don’t swear ever. They decide, not you.
But if it matters, if it’s the truest statement of what you need to communicate, and that’s how your audience will read it? Then I think you’re the one who is best qualified to make that call for your audience and your situation.
I know I won’t convince Bob Bly with this argument, and I’m ok with that. Because as much as I respect him, the ones who are my true compass are my readers, my listeners, my audience.
No, it’s not a simplistic “Secret,” but there are some very pragmatic benefits to adopting a mindset of abundance.
I’m going to be in a documentary! It’s called The Abundance Code, and it’s about folks who have worked through varying kinds of constraints and found a more fulfilling path. (Both financially and personally.)
All told there are 17 of our stories featured in the film. I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m as curious as anyone about how the final edit will turn out! I thought I’d take this episode to talk about the movie’s central theme and how I approach it.
(Spoiler alert: My take on it focuses on pragmatism and staying grounded and real.)
In this 19-minute episode, I talk about:
The Abundance Code premieres the week of June 21, and you’ll be able to view the 90-minute film for free.
Sign up to watch The Abundance Code premiere
Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.
I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.
Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!
So my beautiful and ultra smart friend Julie Ann Cairns has been working on a project lately that involves me, and this is the month we’re launching. It’s not a course or a product, it’s a film, called The Abundance Code, and it’s a documentary capturing some thoughts and insights from a diverse group of successful folks about, more or less, how to cultivate more luck and opportunity within your circumstances.
I love Julie, she’s more “woo woo” than I am, and I know right now some of you are wondering if that’s even possible. But she’s also super analytical.
She has a finance background, she had a prestigious scholarship in Japan, and while she was in school there she actually founded and ran an English school. She’s worked in banking and for many years she ran an educational site for the financial markets. So she has a lot of numbers in her background, and a lot of analysis.
She has a skill that I always find fascinating when I see it, which is that she understands money. She understands the flow of it, whether it’s the stock market or business or our relationship with money.
And yet she also has a very intuitive side and a side that’s very open to, let’s just say, “non-linear” traditions. She’s a very open-hearted and open-minded person.
So that combination of intuition and kind of “fuzziness” with the very clear-headed analytical side I find fascinating, plus she’s just a good person. I’m very grateful for her friendship.
The reason I’m talking Julie up to you is that I’ve been interviewed for the film, and apparently — I haven’t actually seen an edit yet — there are quite a few segments of ‘that pink-haired lady’ in there. And launch date is this month!
So I know what I said, and with these kinds of projects, I think the film guy was here for maybe six hours, so I said a lot of stuff, but then it all comes together in the editing process as something larger. So I know what I said, but I’m curious to see how it works within the greater context.
I have a few other dear friends in the film as well: Bill O’Hanlon, who’s appeared on this podcast, Ruth Buczynsky, JB Glossinger who’s also appeared here, Victoria LaBalme, Jeff Walker.
So I thought in honor of the film I’d talk about how I see this concept of “abundance,” or luck, or opportunity.
They’re doing a worldwide free premiere of the movie, by the way, which you can sign up for at TheAbundanceCode.com. I know that there will be some kind of additional offer to go further with something paid at the end, I think it’s going to be something that’s not ultra expensive, but also it’s not going to be a weird hard sell. Just a chance to go deeper with it if that feels appropriate for you at this point.
The main thing Julie wants to “sell” with this is really the set of ideas about working and taking care of ourselves in a healthier, more productive, more positive way.
So, let’s shift gears for just a quick minute and think about this Abundance thing.
I think the first thing that may come up for a lot of people when we start to toss these ideas around is the notion from some of the popular self-help material that was really pushed by the movie “The Secret,” which is this idea that, “If you visualize it, it will come.” The word often used is manifest.
So if you wish hard enough and ask nicely, the universe is like your all-powerful mommy and will give you millions of dollars and perfect health and beautiful relationships and no problems.
And everyone above the age of four knows this is a lie, or ought to know.
I’m actually profoundly offended by this idea. Because of course, we’ve got 7 or 8 billion people on the planet right now, many of whom are suffering quite profoundly, many of whom are very genuinely stuck in very bad situations, and they’re not there because their mindset is off.
Bad things don’t happen in life because somehow we invited that with our bad mindset. That’s just a toxic viewpoint, and also, you know, incorrect.
So the way that I think about this whole luck and good fortune thing is not that somehow we are entitled to something special from the universe, or that some cosmic justice owes us good things. That’s childish and silly.
But there’s an element of this Abundance business that I think is often overlooked, and is much more pragmatic.
So if you’re listening to this podcast, you have internet, you have some kind of device that can play podcasts, you have enough free time to listen to something for 20 minutes or so. You have some assets.
I read about a fascinating study, I think it might have been in Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism, which is very solid.
I’ll paraphrase and quite possibly get the details a little fuzzed, but:
A group of students is recruited. Before they get started, they’re sorted into groups — some describe themselves as “being lucky” and some as “being unlucky.” They’re all given a newspaper and told that when they find a short specific kind of code in it, they’ll get $20.
The code is in tiny text and let’s say it’s on page 17. But on page 2, there’s a large ad — like one of the big quarter-page display ads that used to appear in that ancient technology, that says, “You don’t have to keep looking — here’s the code.”
So the unlucky people and the lucky people all find the code and get the $20. But the self-described lucky people overwhelmingly see that ad — and remember, it’s much bigger than the “real” code is — and get to the $20 in less than a minute, while the self-described unlucky overwhelmingly pore through the whole paper before they find the good stuff.
People who believed they were lucky were looking for some luck. They said to themselves, “Hm, I wonder if my usual good luck will hold out here, let me take a quick check.”
And the unlucky people didn’t look for that — so they didn’t see it, even though it was quite a bit more prominent.
And that study, in a nutsell, explains how I think about good fortune and abundance.
I just finished Raj Raghunathan’s book If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? (see show notes for a link) which is based on his super popular Coursera course on happiness. It’s a good book with a lot of exercises and a very pragmatic approach.
Here’s what he said about our beliefs of whether or not life, (or The Universe or whatever label you would use) is in its nature benign, indifferent, or hostile:
… the belief that “life can be trusted” and the associated belief that “everything happens for the best” isn’t any less scientifically valid than are the competing beliefs, that “life is indifferent” or that “life is malign and can’t be trusted.
In other words, you could look at the mass of the evidence and argue for any of those. It’s not fundamentally a very scientific question and it can’t really be answered with the scientific method.
But here’s the bit I find useful:
… what can be proven is that from a utilitarian perspective — that is, from the perspective of maximizing happiness — it is better to believe that life is benign than it is to believe otherwise.
And that’s because of this mechanism that we tend to see what we’re looking for. There’s so much of our environment, and there always has been, that’s irrelevant. So just like ancient hunters, we’re looking for the signs that will lead us to what we want — a successful hunt, a site with fresh water or some nice berries to eat. Or in our case here in the 21st century, for more success, bigger audiences, better career or a better business, more satisfying relationships with the people in our lives — all the good stuff.
So for me, the belief that The Universe is Abundant and will Magically Take Care of Us doesn’t work, because a) it’s not consistent with my observations, and b) when something not-so-good happens, I think it comes with a toxic sub-message that we somehow thought something Bad and made the bad thing happen to us.
But the belief that There’s More Out There than I’m Seeing Right Now, and If I Start to Look for It, I’ll Find Something Cool is one I can get behind — because it is consistent with my observations, and because the sub-message is, If I haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to keep looking, because there are a lot of possibilities out there that I haven’t run into or maybe just haven’t noticed yet.
And you know, it all comes with hard work and with paying attention and doing our best and taking consistent action, even if that action is fairly small.
We’re not sitting there waiting for some external force to “manifest.” We’re finding a path, exploring options, taking action, observing carefully, and keeping a good outlook without being delusional about it.
To me, that’s been empowering and useful. It doesn’t just break when things are difficult, or cast me into some kind of funk of self-doubt. It empowers hope. And I hope perhaps it will do those things for you as well.
You can sign up to see the film for free at TheAbundanceCode.com, I’m really excited about it, the launch week starts on June 21st.
Content marketing has been a hot buzzword for awhile now, but it’s tricky to pull off unti you understand this context.
Once upon a time, combining relationship-building content with solid sales strategy was a weird idea. Now it’s pretty mainstream — but a lot of folks are still missing the underlying context that makes it work.
In this 25-minute episode, I talk about:
If you want to join me and the Copyblogger crew for the live Digital Commerce Summit (Oct. 13-14) in Denver, get on over to the site today for the best price on tickets and extras. If you’re quick, you can get a whole year of our Digital Commerce Academy to go with it — which will give you a massive running start on getting the most out of the event.
Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.
I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.
Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!
I’ve been doing lots of mindset and what some might call “woo,” so today I’m going shift gears and get into a key strategic underpinning that makes content marketing work. I wrote about this for Copyblogger 8 years ago, in a post called The Harpoon or the Net: What’s the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?
It recently came to mind because Jerod Morris and I were talking about marketing funnels and paid advertising, such as Facebook advertising, over on CopybloggerFM, the sister podcast to this one. And it occurred to me that the thing that makes paid advertising work in 2016 is the same thing that made content work way back in 2008. So let’s unpack it.
Long, long ago — in other words, a few years ago — there were, for lack of better terms, “content people” — and Copyblogger was one of the very first to write about this approach, and then there were “paid traffic people,” which encompassed most of what then fell under the title Internet Marketing.
Content people wrote interesting things and built an audience. Paid traffic people bought traffic, which was cheaper to do 8 years ago, and piped that traffic into a sales page with the intention of making a sale.
Like all absolutes, there were exceptions. There were a few people who advocated doing both, but the content people often shied away from learning about how to pay for traffic and not get murdered financially, and the paid traffic people looked at the work involved in creating genuinely useful content and weren’t that excited by the prospect.
In the words of S.E. Hinton, That was Then, This is Now.
Believe it or not, I actually generated some controversy when I wrote a post called Is Your Tribe Holding You Down, talking, more or less, about these two groups of folks — the audience-focused types, who at that time were mainly bloggers, and the traffic-focused types. I feel bad today because some of the folks on the traffic-focused side apparently got their feelings quite hurt, when really I was poking a bit of fun at both sides.
If you build a relationship but have no marketing strategy, you’ll be popular and broke. If you have killer marketing strategy but spend no time on relationships, you’ll tend to have big revenue spikes puncutated by very long periods of also being broke, because no one trusts you.
So it’s not wise to be one one side or other of the spectrum, you want to learn from both. I speculated that maybe a new “tribe” could be formed that learned from both worlds, and folks started calling that The Third Tribe. We actually used to have a community with that name, which over time evolved into today’s Authority community.
Hopefully my brothers — at that time, almost all of them were guys — on the Internet Marketing side can appreciate that. I have some very dear friends from that community and tradition, so I’m not slamming them, although I might poke a bit of fun at times.
Back in the day, this notion of combining relationship-building content with smart selling strategy was actually a weird idea. Today it’s just how smart marketers do things, and the labels aren’t quite as limiting as they used to be.
OK, enough history, let’s take a look at how it looks in the real world today.
Unpacking this analogy, if you buy traffic and send it directly to a sales page, it’s what I call a harpoon.
A well-written traditional sales page acts like a harpoon. When a likely prospect swims along, if the writer’s aim is good and she gets enough power behind that harpoon, she can make the sale.
The main issue with that traditional sales page — if y0u’ve been online awhile, you might remember when they all had fake yellow highlighter and red headlines, it was not a high point in web design history. But the main issue is that this kind of page is crazy hard to write.
Now it can be learned, and of course we can hire folks to write them for us. But the folks who are genuinely good at it are also genuinely expensive.
In a world without infinite resources to learn something hard or pay for something expensive, we needed another model.
Instead of hurling your single-pointed communication as forcefully as you can, consider encouraging your prospect to wrap himself in a friendly, supportive net.
In other words, rather than trying to harpoon customers with single-shot sales letters, snare them in a net of useful, relevant content.
Strong content will keep luring your prospect back for regular bites. Each bite builds a little more trust. Each bite builds your reputation as a friendly authority.
This is what today we call “strategic content marketing.” We build an audience with our content, and that content builds trust over time. It also educates that potential customer on what they would need to know before making a purchase.
This is wide territory — it might be a pragmatic thing that they need to believe. For example, folks may be reluctant to buy a WordPress theme if they don’t realize the dangers of putting all of their content on something like Facebook or Medium. To speak to that, I wrote a post on The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Online Business, about the danger of building all of your business content on a platform that someone else controls.
It might be a process that they need to understand. When folks learn more about content marketing strategy from podcasts on our RainmakerFM network, or posts on Copyblogger or DigitalCommerce.com, they can see how they would use the Rainmaker platform to deliver that. People who don’t have at least some grasp of content strategy wouldn’t see the need for a platform that’s structured the way ours is.
It might even be a more personal value or belief. Brian Clark wrote a great post about The Snowboard, the Subdural Hematoma, and the Secret of Life, about how a brain injury gave him clarity about what was important in his life — and the values that event revealed were values that either resonated or didn’t. I wrote one of my own (internally we sometimes call these “hematoma posts”) about struggling in the corporate world for being “naive” because I was an idealistic person and I thought that was a better way to do business.
And you may have noticed that this podcast is really about me expressing my values as a human being who’s in business, hopefully to empower others to trust their own instincts and build on their strengths instead of getting discouraged.
A final word about this “Content Net” idea — it sounds very nicey-nice and “if you build it they will come,” but it isn’t.
Seriously interesting and useful content has to be paired with business strategy if you want it to work. Otherwise you just stay adrift in that “popular but broke” thing, which is maybe not where you want to be.
Again, I’m not claiming I invented this or Copyblogger invented it, but I do believe that we have become known for this very ethical, principled approach, and we love to offer our platform to others who are teaching this approach.
Content strategy isn’t “rocket surgery,” but it has a fair number of pieces and it’s important to know how they work together.
There are a few resouces we can offer you to figure this out. The first one is 100% free, which is our content marketing library. Brian Clark and I, joined by a few other folks, have put together a comprehensive library of ebooks to give you that understanding.
If you’re the kind of person who’s self motivated, this can definitely be 100% of what you need. Grab it at the Copyblogger Blog (>products >Free! MyCopyblogger)
If you need a little more hand-holding and motivational fire, my best recommendation for 2016 is to join us at the Digital Commerce Summit. It’s happening in Denver in October.
Right now, but this will expire soon, you can actually get the Summit ticket and a full year of our Digital Commerce Academy, which is a more advanced series of courses about how to do digital business. Pricing on that is going up on May 27, 2016, so boogie on over to DigitalCommerce.com if you think you want to join us there.
I’m going to be doing a keynote on how to actually use the information that you learn at that conference, or any conference. The rest of the event is really a curriculum, so you learn how the different pieces go together — not only for your marketing but also for your actual product or service. We’re structuring it so that you start to take action to get to the next level from where you are now — before you even leave the event. It’s all oriented to action you can take right now, paired with the understanding of the larger strategy so you see how everything fits together.
The conference is perfect for people who want to make something happen with a digital business — either a side project or something that could grow into quite a large business — but they’re having issues with overwhelm. They have some of it figured out but there are pieces that you’re finding intimidating or too confusing.
One of my super favorite things about our live events is meeting people, because we attract an audience that I find quite cool — very principled and interesting and individualistic. I always carve out a lot of time — especially look for me on day two, when my talk is done and I’m not so nervous — to hang out with the folks I meet there. Day Two for me is basically going to be sitting in on the sessions and schmoozing with you guys. 🙂
Join me this coming Thursday on CopybloggerFM for an episode on how to put together opt-in bonuses to start the conversation with your audience.
What’s one of the biggest constraints that keeps us from doing the things we want to do? We don’t have the time. Here are some thoughts on how to manage that.
Remember when the internet was going to give us all the free time we could imagine?
Yeah, well. Not so much.
In this 27-minute episode, I talk about:
Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.
I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.
Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!
If you caught last week’s podcast, I talked about the ideas I’m noodling with for the book I’m writing. The book is really about constructing your “Escape Pod” — the structures and patterns that will get you out of whatever’s not serving you today, and on to your next chapter.
One of the biggest deterrents for any of us is a lack of free time. Very few people have free time in any kind of significant quantity. And when we do, we do dopey things with it like play Nintendo or watch TV we don’t even really like or have fights on Facebook.
I’ve talked before about the irony of me talking about productivity, since I am not one of Nature’s Organized People. But that’s maybe part of why I can help you out — if it works for me, it’s very likely to work for you.
When your time is a significant constraint, when you’re at a point in your life when you don’t have a lot of free time — for most of this, this is most of the time — the worst thing you can do is to multitask, because it makes everything take longer.
This is backed up by approximately a trillion studies. We all think we can multitask, but we don’t realize how poor a job we’re doing on everything that’s being done that way. Incidentally, this very much applies to doing anything with your cell phone while you are driving your car. Short of listening to some music or your nav, please don’t do stuff with your phone while you’re driving. It’s dangerous, and even if it feels like you have good control, studies show that you do not.
While obviously you can multitask, since most of us do most of the time, it actually takes you longer to get all of your stuff done, and you don’t do a good job of it.
If you’re not going to multitask and you want to try something different, the first thing to do is find your scraps of time.
In the U.S. by law you have to get breaks every X number of hours you’re working. In some jobs, this is hilariously not a thing. For example if you’re a medical resident, you’re cracking up right now. But for most of us, we get some defined breaks during the day.
Then there’s before we go to work, after we get home from work, etc.
One key marker to look for is: Do you spend any time watching TV, socializing on Facebook or another platform, or playing digital games? If so, think about whether you’re willing to take 30 minutes, or even 10-15 minutes, from those activities for another purpose.
A lot of times we are very unwilling to give up on those because they’re our relaxation time, our unwinding time. If your job is stressful and everything else is stressful, you want that time to relax.
What I would just suggest as a thing you could let ping around in your thinking is: Spending regular time every day working toward something larger, a goal that you care about a lot, is genuinely restorative in a way that TV, Facebook, and gaming are not.
This isn’t about being one of those people who fills every moment with something “worthy.” I’m not that person and I think you’re not either, otherwise I would annoy you and you’d be spending your time with other people who are good at being perfect.
It’s just about cultivating a small habit of working on something meaningful.
This is easier, by the way, if you use my values hack — one that I’ve talked about, certainly not one that I invented — to charge your battery. I’ll give you a link to that in the show notes.
The other thing to know is that if you wait until your “little habit time” to figure out what you’re going to do with it, the time will evaporate. Deciding what to work on is work.
So let’s say you’re going to skip 15 minutes of TV every day and work on your thing instead. The first set of tasks you do in your 15 minutes is: Figure out what tasks you’re going to do in your 15 minutes.
Make a nice list you can find easily. Could be pen and a paper notebook, could be an Evernote item, could be a Google doc or just the to-do app on your phone. Just have a list of things to spend 15 minutes on.
Some possibilities are:
9 times out of 10 for most of us, it’s either planning content or creating content. One of my favorite resources for this was a post Pamela Wilson wrote for Copyblogger that set out a content plan to produce one excellent piece of content per week.
Link
The reason we start with these itsy bitsy habit processes is that once you have even a small amount of movement, you’ve opened up the possibility of momentum.
If you work on, let’s say it’s a side business, 15 minutes a day, it will take a long time to get traction. But you’ll get traction faster than working on it zero hours a day, and you’ll also make much more progress than you would working on it an hour a week.
But one thing that happens is that it’s fun to make progress. It feels good, it’s empowering, it’s energizing. So those 15 minutes start to turn into 30. And then you realize there’s some other chunk of time you spend on a “relaxation” that you would rather put to your project.
Changing behavior is fundamentally psychologically scary. It shakes up our attachment to who we think we are. These little habits are a way to sneak up on the change, make progress, even if it’s very slow at first, and start to open up space for new possibilities.
So half of my statement is “don’t multitask,” the other side of the same coin is that you compartmentalize your time and your focus.
That means, when you’re at your day job, you’re really there. You’re looking for ways to bring meaning to it, you’re looking for ways to do it as excellently as you can, or you’re looking for another job where you can do those things.
You’re fully present.
And you’re fully present when you come home, whether you have other people there or not. You’re fully present for your project. You’re fully present with your family, if you have family.
Each moment is like a compartment, and you try to focus fully on that compartment while you’re in it.
This is really not easy at all to do, but if you remind yourself all day every day to strive toward it, you get better at it.
This all by itself is very energizing, even if it’s imperfect. Because thinking about work when you’re with your family, and family when you’re at work, and your side project all of the time, is exhausting. It’s draining.
Link in the show notes — Power of Full Engagement
Finally, I want to let you know that you can actually do this.
Even if you’ve tried some of these before and petered out with it. That’s so normal. We’re talking about behavioral change, and that almost always takes a few tries.
But it rewards multiple tries. If you try some of these out, do well for two weeks, then drift off for a couple of weeks, that’s completely fine. Just come back to your little habits and start fresh. You can always start fresh.
This isn’t about being perfect and it’s not about superheroic levels of will power or energy. It’s about building and growing and taking small steps toward the things you want to create in your life.
Let me know about your journey! And thank you all!
